Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Bush was interviewed by WaPo reporters today (why just excerpts, WaPo?), and before they could even ask a question, he volunteered “I want to share one thought I had with you, and I’m inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops”. He means overall, and permanently, not necessarily a “surge” in Iraq, but I think we know where this is headed. He says the military is not “broken,” as Colin Powell said, because the generals haven’t told him that it is; they also say, when asked to evaluate themselves, that their biggest flaw is that they care too much. Sheesh, what does he expect them to say?

Evidently, they don’t say it’s broken but they do say it’s “stressed.”

Shrub says, “we need to reset our military. There’s no question the military has been used a lot.” Reset? What does that mean? Like turning it off and turning it on again?

On Iraq itself, “I’m going to take my time to make sure that the policy, when it comes out, the American people will see that we are -- have got a new way forward to achieve an important objective, which is a country that can govern, sustain and defend itself,” adding, “Not Iraq, you understand, just a country. Possibly Sweden.”

He uses some variation of that phrase about showing/reassuring the American people three times in a short period of time. I’d say this was a sign of insecurity except it’s always been like this. Within a week or two of 9/11/01, they were talking more about reassuring the American people that air travel was safe than about actually making air travel safe.

By the way, have we completely abandoned the color-coded alert system?